Mike's views on politics and the world in general

Menu

Below is a transcript of an interview Morgan did with Christine Romans of CNN International. I watched it on the noon news program…not by choice, mind you. That was all they had on the TV at the doctor’s waiting room.

ROMANS: CNN’s Piers Morgan has talked about gun control many times since the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre that killed 20 children, took the lives of six staff members. Today, he spoke about what he thinks about the vice president’s task force on gun violence. Here is more from that interview.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PIERS MORGAN, HOST, PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT (voice-over): It is time that American politicians woke up to the reality of what is happening in their country. The last four mass shootings in America all involved deranged young men using AR-15 military-style assault rifles. These are killing machines. They have no place on civilian streets or in civilian hands.

And the politicians can hide behind all sorts of rhetoric about the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms and all of this, but no one can convince me and no one has convinced me the founding fathers ever meant for a situation where disturbed young men in America could go to a Wal-Mart or the equivalent and buy one of these machine guns and go to a movie theater or a school or church or temple or down the street and gun down fellow Americans. That is not what the Second Amendment is supposed to protect.

And these politicians have been cowered by the NRA and the gun lobby for too long. It is time they stood up and said enough.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN ANCHOR: Of course, back when it was written, it took 10 minutes to load a gun as well. Let’s talk about the Alex Jones interview. You’re English, and I’m Australian. We look at it from an outsider’s perspective, and some people are shocked by what they see in terms of the types of guns readily available.

You have say Jones’ rant about despots taking away guns back fired. One Twitter follower agrees with that. I think we’ve got a graphic to show you. He says this. “I think he” — meaning you — “handled him perfectly, sat back and let Alex make his own noose.”

I thought the same thing when I was watching the interview. Did you feel that it did back fire on him?

MORGAN: Honestly, I thought it was the best advertisement for gun control I could possibly have put on air. Alex Jones represents a very extreme — very influential, very vocal part of gun lobby in America. He rants like this every day to millions of Americans, most of them whom believe what he says.

This is a guy who believes that President Bush, his administration, ordered the 9/11 disaster, for example. So you’re talking with people who are scary in their thought process. And they believe that any government that wants any form of gun control after any massacres is attacking the Second Amendment. And in my case, they want to deport me, which would infringe my First Amendment rights, which is ridiculous.

You and I come from countries that both saw, in the mid-’90s, big massacres. In Tasmania, just off Australia, Dunblane in Scotland, 35 died in Tasmania, 16 in Dunblane, all still children. In both countries, there was such national outrage and a unanimous view from the politicians of the countries, in your case, a right wing politician, John Howard, in Britain, first John Major and then Tony Blair, so right and left. And really significant gun control was brought in, outlawing all forms of assault weapons and most handguns.

And guess what? In Australia, you haven’t had a mass shooting since 1996. And in Britain, we have had two much smaller mass shootings, but not a single shooting at a school, and a gun murder rate of about 35 people a year, which I think is similar to Australia.

In America, 11,000 people are murdered with guns a year. 18,000 take their own lives with guns a year. 100,000 Americans are hit by gunfire a year. And every time one of these massacres happens, all I hear is the gun lobby saying, don’t touch our guns. Well, sorry, we’re going to touch some of your guns because that’s what a humane society does. It says, these assault rifles are killing Americans, there is no reason for them, we’re going to take them off the street.

And I applaud Michael Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo and President Obama and Joe Biden and the others, for finally, I think, getting what most decent civilized Americans want.

It is not about taking away people’s handguns at home to defend their families. I get that. That is what I think the founding fathers intended by the Second Amendment. This is about removing machine guns from the streets of America.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROMANS: We don’t know how many guns there are on streets of America. We don’t know exactly how many guns are sold every year, in part, because we don’t count them. We don’t. The United States does not count gun sales.

I won’t to show you a graphic. FBI background checks, you can see a record year for background checks, left side of your screen. 2.8 million in December alone, up 39 percent from the month before. Experts say it is because of the Christmas holidays and the rush after Newtown.

A lot of gun enthusiasts thinking that something had changed in this country, and they wanted to load up on guns and ammo, you know, in case there are going to be controls down the line.

So the lefties are giddy because Piers Morgan got conspiracy nut Alex Jones to go on a rant on his show. I’ll give you that Jones is a genuine nut, but after watching this interview and reading the transcript, it can be seen that Morgan is an ignorant buffoon who has no business talking about guns or gun control.